Introduction

My home lab uses a Synology Diskstation DS1813+ for its iSCSI storage. It’s used for both the virtual machine storage and any ISO files that I need for the VMs.

This will be a multi-part post, as it covers a lot of topics…

NUC Specs, and build information,
Building a custom ESX image that includes drivers for the NUC’s network card and SSD,
DHCP, PXE booting and automatic installation scripts,
Synology configuration for VMware datastores,
Networking, VLANs and getting it to work,
Installing ESXi
Any other configuration,
Final (random) thoughts.

Synology Configuration

Within the Synology DSM, open Storage Manager, and select iSCSI LUN. Click Create and follow the wizard to create a new LUN and iSCSI Target for your VMware datastore.